Linguistics Homecoming Lecture by Hannah Haynie '03
"Languages ‘round the girdled earth: Insights about morphosyntactic typology from a new global language database"
In the last 20 years, since my graduation from Dartmouth, many advances have shaped the field of linguistic typology, from the publication of the World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2005) to refinements in the concepts we use to describe linguistic diversity (e.g. Bickel & Nichols 2007) to growing interest in how patterns of grammatical diversity may reflect diachronic processes (e.g. Wichmann & Holman 2009). Inspired by these advances, as well as new possibilities for accessing and analyzing data, my recent work has assembled new typological datasets and recruited new analytical tools to re-examine longstanding questions in the field. Here I introduce the Grambank database, which encodes information for 195 morphosyntactic features from over 2,400 languages around the world (Skirgård et al. 2023). This large, global dataset has enabled a wide range of typological research, and I illustrate this with recent findings about which language universals are truly universal, what dimensions of grammatical diversity best capture the variation in this large global sample, and how historical processes like inheritance and areal contact have shaped the diversity of human grammars.
Speaker Bio:
Hannah Haynie is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She graduated from Dartmouth in 2003 with a major in Geography and minor in Linguistics, later earned M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California Berkeley. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding language diversity and language change.
Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics.